The War of the End of the World

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  At the corner on which there stands the boarding house of Our Lady of Grace—on the fac$$$de of which is a sign that reads: “Entry forbidden unless shirts are worn”—Lieutenant Pires Ferreira recognizes, his face a blur in the blinding sunlight, Lieutenant Pinto Souza, an officer attached to his battalion, coming his way. He has been here only a week, and still has the high spirits of those recently arrived in town. They have made friends with each other and fallen into the habit of whiling away their evenings together.

  “I’ve read the report you wrote about Uauá,” Pinto Souza says, falling in step with him as he heads for the camp. “What a terrifying experience.”

  Lieutenant Pires Ferreira looks at him, shielding his eyes from the sun’s glare with one hand. “For those of us who survived it, yes, no doubt. For poor Dr. Antônio Alves dos Santos especially,” he says. “But what happened in Uauá is nothing by comparison with what happened to Major Febrônio and Colonel Moreira César.”

  “I don’t mean the dead, but what you report about the uniforms and the arms,” Lieutenant Pinto Souza explains.

  “Oh, I see,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira murmurs.

  “I don’t understand it,” his friend exclaims in consternation. “The officers of the General Staff haven’t done anything.”

  “The same thing happened to the second and third expeditionary forces as happened to us,” Pires Ferreira says. “They, too, were defeated not so much by the jagunços as by the heat, the thorns, and the dust.”

  He shrugs. He wrote that report just after his arrival in Juazeiro following the defeat, with tears in his eyes, hoping that the account of his experiences would prove useful to his comrades-at-arms. He explained, with a wealth of detail, how the uniforms had been reduced to tatters by the sun, the rain, and the dust, how flannel jackets and woolen trousers had turned into poultices and been torn to ribbons by the branches of the caatinga. He told how the soldiers lost their forage caps and boots and had to go barefoot most of the time. But above all he was explicit, scrupulous, insistent with regard to the subject of weapons: “Despite its magnificent precision, the Mannlicher very frequently misfires; a few grains of sand in the magazine are enough to prevent the bolt from functioning. Moreover, if many shots are fired in rapid succession, the heat expands the barrel and the magazine then shrinks in size and the six-cartridge chargers cannot be introduced into it. The extractor jams from the effect of the heat and spent cartridges must be removed by hand. And finally, the breech is so delicate that it breaks apart at the first blow.” He not only has written this; he has reported it all to the investigating commissions that have questioned him and has repeated it in dozens of private conversations. And what good has all that done?

  “In the beginning I thought that they didn’t believe me,” he says. “That they were convinced I’d written that to excuse my defeat. I know now, though, why the officers of the General Staff aren’t doing anything.”

  “Why is that?” Lieutenant Pinto Souza asks.

  “Are they going to change the uniforms of every last corps of the Brazilian Army? Aren’t all of them made of flannel and wool? Are they going to throw all the boots on the dump heap? Toss all the Mannlichers we have in the sea? We have to go on using them, whether they’re any good or not.”

  They have arrived at the camp of the Third Infantry Battalion, on the right bank of the Itapicuru. It is close by the town, whereas the other camps are farther away from Queimadas, upriver. The huts are lined up facing the hillsides of reddish earth, strewn with great dark rocks, at the bottom of which the blackish-green waters of the river flow. The soldiers of the company are waiting for him; floggings are always well attended since they are one of the battalion’s very few diversions. Private Queluz is all ready for his punishment, standing with his back bared in the middle of a circle of soldiers who are teasing him. He wisecracks back, laughing. As the two officers walk up to them, their faces grow serious, and in the eyes of the man about to be disciplined Pires Ferreira sees a sudden fear, which he tries his best to hide beneath his insolent, mocking manner.

  “Thirty blows,” he reads in the daily report. “That’s a lot. Who put you on report?”

  “Colonel Joaquim Manuel de Medeiros, sir,” Queluz mutters.

  “What did you do?” Pires Ferreira asks. He is putting on the leather glove so that the friction of the cane will not raise blisters on his palm as he whips the man. Queluz blinks in embarrassment, looking right and left out of the corner of his eye. There are snickers, murmurs from the hundred soldiers standing in a circle watching.

  “Nothing, sir,” he answers, swallowing hard.

  Pires Ferreira eyes the bystanders questioningly.

  “He tried to rape a bugler from the Fifth Regiment,” Lieutenant Pinto Souza says disgustedly. “A kid who’s not yet fifteen. It was the colonel himself who caught him. You’re a pervert, Queluz.”

  “That’s not true, sir, that’s not true,” the soldier says, shaking his head. “The colonel misunderstood my intentions. We were just innocently bathing in the river. I swear to you.”

  “And was that why the bugler started yelling for help?” Pinto Souza says. “Don’t be impudent.”

  “The fact is, the bugler also misunderstood my intentions, sir,” the soldier says, looking very earnest. But as these words are greeted by a general guffaw, he, too, finally bursts out laughing.

  “The sooner we begin, the sooner we’ll be finished,” Pires Ferreira says, seizing the first cane from among a number of them that his orderly is holding within reach of his hand. He tries it in the air, and as the flexible rod comes whistling down, the circle of soldiers steps back. “Shall we tie you up or will you take your punishment like a man?”

  “Like a man, sir,” Private Queluz says, turning pale.

  “Like a man who buggers buglers,” someone adds, and there is another burst of laughter.

  “Turn around, then, and grab your balls,” Lieutenant Pires Ferreira orders.

  The first blows he gives him are hard ones, and he sees him stagger as the rod turns his back red; then, as the effort leaves him too drenched with sweat, he lets up a little. The group of soldiers sings out the number of strokes. Before they have reached twenty the purple welts on Queluz’s back begin to bleed. With the last one, the soldier falls to his knees, but he rises to his feet immediately and turns toward the lieutenant, reeling. “Thank you very much, sir,” he murmurs, his face dripping with sweat and his eyes bloodshot.

  “You can console yourself with the thought that I’m as worn out as you are,” Pires Ferreira pants. “Go to the infirmary and have them put a disinfectant on you. And leave buglers alone.”

  The group disperses. A few of the men walk off with Queluz, and one of them throws a towel over him, while others climb down the steep clay bank to cool off in the Itapicuru. Pires Ferreira rinses his face off in a bucket of water that his orderly brings over to him. He signs the report indicating that he has administered the punishment. Meanwhile, he answers Lieutenant Pinto Souza’s questions; the latter is still obsessed by his report on Uauá. Were those rifles old ones or ones recently purchased?

  “They weren’t new ones,” Pires Ferreira says. “They’d been used in 1884, in the São Paulo and Paraná campaign. But it’s not because they’re old that they’re defective. The problem is the way the Mannlicher is built. It was designed and developed in Europe, for a very different climate and combat conditions, for an army with a capability for maintaining them that ours doesn’t have.”

  He is interrupted by the sound of many bugles blowing, in all the camps at once.

  “Officers’ assembly,” Pinto Souza says. “That’s not on the order of the day.”

  “It must be the theft of those hundred Comblain rifles. It’s driving the senior officers mad,” Pires Ferreira says. “Maybe they’ve discovered who the thieves are and are going to shoot them.”

  “Or maybe the Minister of War has arrived,” Pinto Souza says. “His visit’s been announced.
”

  They head for the assembly area of the Third Battalion, but on arriving there they are informed that they will also be meeting with the officers of the Seventh and Fourteenth; in other words, the whole First Brigade. They run to the command post, set up in a tannery on the Itapicuru, a quarter of a league upstream. On their way there, they notice an unusual hustle and bustle in all the camps, and the bugles have set up such a din now that it is difficult to decipher what the calls are. In the tannery they find several dozen officers already assembled. Some of them must have been surprised in the middle of their afternoon siesta, for they are still putting on their blouses or buttoning their tunics. The commanding officer of the First Brigade, Colonel Joaquim Manuel de Medeiros, standing on top of a bench, is speaking, with many gestures, but Pires Ferreira and Pinto Souza are unable to hear what he is saying, for all around them are cheers, shouts of “Long live Brazil” and “Hurray for the Republic,” and some of the officers are tossing their kepis in the air to show their joy.

  “What’s happening? What’s happening?” Lieutenant Pinto Souza asks.

  “We’re leaving for Canudos within two hours!” an artillery captain shouts back at him euphorically.

  [II]

  “Madness? Misunderstandings? That’s not enough. It doesn’t explain everything,” the Baron de Canabrava murmured. “There has also been stupidity and cruelty.”

  He had a sudden image of the kindly face of Gentil de Castro, with his pink cheeks and his blond sideburns, bending over to kiss Estela’s hand on some festive occasion at the Palace, when he was a member of the Emperor’s cabinet. He was as dainty as a lady, as naïve as a child, good-hearted, obliging. What else besides imbecility and wickedness could explain what had happened to Gentil de Castro?

  “I suppose they’re what lies behind not only Canudos but all of history,” he said aloud, grimacing in displeasure.

  “Unless one believes in God,” the nearsighted journalist interrupted him, his harsh voice reminding the baron of his existence. “As they did up there. Everything was crystal-clear. Famine, the bombardments, the men with their bellies ripped open, those who died of starvation. The Dog or the Father, the Antichrist or the Blessed Jesus. They knew immediately which of the two was responsible for any given event, whether it was a blessing or a curse. Don’t you envy them? Everything becomes easy if one is capable of identifying the good or the evil behind each and every thing that happens.”

  “I suddenly remembered Gentil de Castro just now,” the Baron de Canabrava murmured. “The stupefaction he must have felt on learning why his newspaper offices were being burned down, why they were destroying his house.”

  The nearsighted journalist thrust his head forward. The two of them were sitting face to face in the leather armchairs, separated by a little table with a pitcher full of papaya-and-banana punch on it. The morning was going by quickly; the light that beat down on the garden was already a noon light. Cries of peddlers hawking food, parrots, prayers, services came over the tops of the walls.

  “This part of the story can be explained,” the man with loose-hinged limbs said in his piercing voice. “What happened in Rio de Janeiro, in São Paulo, is logical and rational.”

  “Logical and rational that the mob should pour out into the streets to destroy newspaper offices, to attack private houses, to murder people unable to point out on a map where Canudos is located, because a handful of fanatics thousands of kilometers away defeated an expeditionary force? That’s logical and rational?”

  “They were roused to a frenzy by propaganda,” the nearsighted journalist insisted. “You haven’t read the papers, Baron.”

  “I learned what happened in Rio from one of the victims,” the latter replied. “He came within a hair’s breadth of being killed himself.”

  The baron had met the Viscount de Ouro Preto in London. He had spent an entire afternoon with the former monarchist leader, who had taken refuge in Portugal after hurriedly fleeing from Brazil following the terrifying uprisings that had taken place in Rio de Janeiro when the news of the rout of the Seventh Regiment and the death of Moreira César had reached the city. Incredulous, dumfounded, frightened out of his wits, the elderly ex-dignitary had witnessed, from the balconies of the town house of the Baroness de Guanabara, where he had chanced to pay a call, a crowd of demonstrators parade down the Rua Marquês from the Military Club, carrying posters calling for his head as the person responsible for the defeat of the Republic at Canudos. Shortly thereafter, a messenger had come to inform him that his house had been sacked, along with those of other well-known monarchists, and that the offices of A Gazeta de Notícias and A Liberdade were burning down.

  “The English spy at Ipupiará. The rifles being sent to Canudos that were discovered in the backlands. The Kropatchek projectiles used by the jagunços that could only have been brought by British ships. And the explosive bullets. The lies that have been harped on night and day have turned into truths.”

  “You are overestimating the audience of the Jornal de Notícias.” The Baron de Canabrava smiled.

  “The Epaminondas Gonçalves of Rio de Janeiro is named Alcindo Guanabara and his daily A República,” the nearsighted journalist stated. “Since Major Febrônio’s defeat, A República hasn’t let a single day go by without presenting conclusive evidence of the complicity between the Monarchist Party and Canudos.”

  The baron barely heard him, for he was hearing in his mind what the Viscount de Ouro Prêto, wrapped in a blanket that barely left his mouth free, had told him: “What’s pathetic is that we never took Gentil de Castro seriously. He was a nobody in the days of the Empire. He never was awarded a title, an honor, an official post. His monarchism was purely sentimental; it had nothing to do with reality.”

  “The conclusive evidence, for example, with regard to the cattle and arms in Sete Lagoas, in the state of Minas Gerais,” the nearsighted journalist went on to say. “Weren’t they being sent to Canudos? Weren’t they being convoyed there by Manuel João Brandão, the known leader of thugs in the hire of monarchist caudilhos? Hadn’t Brandão been in the service of Joaquim Nabuco, of the Viscount de Ouro Preto? Alcindo gives the names of the police who arrested Brandão, prints word for word his statements confessing everything. What does it matter if Brandão never existed and such a consignment of arms was never discovered? It appeared in print, so it was true. The story of the spy of Ipupiará all over again, blown up to even greater proportions. Do you see how logical, how rational all that is? You weren’t lynched, Baron, because there aren’t any Jacobins in Salvador. The only thing that excites Bahians is carnival time. They couldn’t care less about politics.”

  “Well, I see you’re ready to work for the Diário da Bahia,” the baron said jokingly. “You already know all about our adversaries’ vile deeds.”

  “You aren’t any better than they are,” the nearsighted journalist muttered. “Have you forgotten that Epaminondas is your ally and that your former friends are members of the government?”

  “You’re discovering a little too late that politics is a dirty business,” the baron said.

  “Not for the Counselor,” the nearsighted journalist answered. “It was a clean and clear-cut one for him.”

  “It was for poor Gentil de Castro, too.” The baron sighed.

  On returning to Europe, he had found on his desk a letter sent from Rio several months before, in which Gentil de Castro himself had asked him, in his careful handwriting: “What is this Canudos affair all about, my dear Baron? What is happening there in your beloved lands in the Northeast? They are laying all sorts of conspiratorial nonsense at our doorstep, and we are not able even to defend ourselves because we haven’t the least idea what is going on. Who is Antônio Conselheiro? Does he even exist? Who are these Sebastianist despoilers with whom the Jacobins insist on linking us? I would be much obliged to you if you would enlighten me in this regard…” And now the elderly man whom the name of Gentil fit so well was dead because he had organized and f
inanced a rebellion aimed at restoring the Empire and making Brazil the slave of England. Years before, when he had first begun receiving copies of A Gazeta de Notícias and A Liberdade, the Baron de Canabrava wrote to the Viscount de Ouro Preto, asking him what sort of absurd business all this was, putting out two papers nostalgically yearning for a return to the good old days of the monarchy, at a time when it was obvious to everyone that the Empire was forever dead and buried. “What can I tell you, my dear friend?…It wasn’t my idea, or João Alfredo’s, or any of your friends’ here; on the contrary, it was Colonel Gentil de Castro’s idea, and his alone. He’s decided to throw away his money by bringing out these publications in order to defend the names of those of us who served the Empire from the contumely to which we are subjected. We are all of the opinion that it is quite untimely to seek to restore the monarchy at this juncture, but how to put a damper on poor Gentil de Castro’s passionate enthusiasm? I don’t know if you remember him. A good man, but never an outstanding figure…”

  “He wasn’t in Rio but in Petrópolis when the news arrived in the capital,” the viscount said. “I sent word to him through my son, Afonso Celso, that he shouldn’t even think of returning to Rio, that his newspaper offices had been burned to the ground and his house destroyed, and a mob in the Rua do Ouvidor and the Largo de São Francisco was demanding his death. That was enough to make Gentil de Castro decide to return.”

  The baron pictured him, pink-cheeked, packing his valise and heading for the railway station, as meanwhile in Rio, in the Military Club, twenty officers or so mingled their blood before a square and compass and swore to avenge Moreira César, drawing up a list of traitors to be executed. The name heading it: Gentil de Castro.

  “In Meriti Station, Afonso Celso bought him the daily papers,” the Viscount de Ouro Preto went on. “Gentil de Castro was able to read about everything that had happened the day before in the federal capital. The demonstrations, the closing of stores and theaters, the flags at half staff and the black crepe on the balconies, the attacks on newspaper offices, the assaults. And, naturally, the sensational news in A República: ‘The rifles found at A Gazeta de Notícias and A Liberdade are of the same manufacture and the same caliber as those in Canudos.’ And what do you think his reaction was?